Temporary City of Fun: First Rooflection 2011

The steamy summer heat hits central Tennessee early each year. As the temperature rises to a regional hot-flash, people pack their bags. Some head even further south; others shuttle East; the smart ones trek north. But the best vacation for the rock n roll fan requires a little jaunt across a couple county lines.

The media buzz for the tenth annual Bonnaroo’s been building for months, but this year the fanboy’s Christmas in June just kind of snuck up on me.

Even though this will be my sixth consecutive year volunteering creativity and time in exchange for my wristband, it requires a certain confidence in a higher power to conjure the carefree courage to suffer the punishing sunlight and celebrate the musical delight. Working at the Academy in Planet Roo anchors my Bonnaroo experience by providing a focus and a sense of service, with our diverse offering of gardening and arts classes. But during the hours when I’m not staffing the tent or supporting our staff, if I am not sleeping or eating, I am off exploring the festival grounds and catching as many concerts as I can manage.

The temporary city as cultural carnival—constructed in tents and motorhomes and countless other improvisations of functional art as life—defies logic and requires logistics of a heroic level. Back in 06 and 07, I needed the medical tent more than I want to admit, and in sheer amazement and need, I witnessed a team and facilities of stunning compassion, resources, and efficiency. All the Woodstock slurs and hippy stereotypes and permitted debaucheries asides, running this festival is a serious business, and the ‘roo producers possess a deep ethical and humanitarian ethos to provide such an excellent backend of support.

Planning and packing are a project in themselves, but the annual joyful anticipation comes from really studying the schedule and imagining what shows I might get to see. Making a playlist that progresses through the schedule helps plot my weekend and hones my longing, knowing of course that I will inevitably miss a show I wanted to see or stumble across something new that takes my breath away.

This year, I waited until a few days before to really ponder the offerings and the order in which they’re scheduled to unfold. Along with looking at the extended weather forecast, learning the schedule is a fan’s perfect pre-Roo pastime. Entire online discussion communities exist just to talk about this festival. My first few years, I lived on these boards for weeks, trying to grasp what awaited me.

Just to remind myself that I am a new and better person than the one who started coming to this festival in 2006, an added aspect of my more recent Bonnaroo experience comes from the clean and sober community that hosts a table and meets as a fellowship for sharing in meetings twice each day, always gathering near the yellow balloons near the Sonic Café where we might see stickers such as “One Show At A Time.”

Landing onsite on June 8th for the last pre-day before the 2011 festival kicks off today, I was amazed and grateful for how well-organized the intake and setup proceedings have become, stretching our human potential to construct a harmonious four-day music and arts society from the chaos that remains part of the larger reality inside and outside our warm, dusty, temporary zone of fandom and fun.

TTU Features the Academy

Thanks to TTU for featuring the Academy again this year:

http://www.tntech.edu/pressreleases/ttu-academy-volunteers-teach-guerrilla-tactics-at-bonnaroo/

My third Bonnaroo begins in a few hours!!

Thanks to The Academy in Planet Roo, I will be at the huge music festival in Manchester, TN once again!!

From last year, here's a picture of me celebrating graffiti in honor of Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and a photo of the Academy volunteers.

Rock history being made right before your eyes

What a Saturday this year’s festival provided!

From the sweet and sweaty gypsy punk mosh-pit at the Gogol Bordello show (pictured) to Ben Harper’s soulfully seductive late afternoon set, I chose quality over quantity today, attending fewer shows but staying at them longer. This fit my “injured reserve” list status (see yesterday’s blog), and the shows I chose were all stellar, with the best being the last.

Every Bonnaroo seems to have at least one show of pure legend, one undiluted, blissful, and transcendent nugget of rock history being made right before your eyes.

Last year, My Morning Jacket’s late Friday night magic marathon surely secured that band’s ascendant fate and future reputation.

Even though the What Stage sets I’ve seen so far were strong, with Ben Harper’s being the best, the true headliner of the festival did not play the main stage. Move over Maynard. Move over Sting.

This year, the revered and revelatory set of pure legend transpired at midnight on Which Stage when Bonnaroo became Wayne’s World. After an enthusiastic sound check of “War Pigs” at 11pm, the masses waited for an hour. Then, The Flaming Lips arrived in a space ship, blew our minds for over two hours of absolutely insanely beautiful psychedelic pop, and then left in the space ship again.

The battery on my computer is dying, and my free time in the shade is running out. I hope to finish this journal later—probably tomorrow. Another great Bonnaroo ends today.

My day two battleroo

The complimentary guidebook that comes with each Bonnaroo ticket includes much sage advice; unfortunately, many of us do not heed the words of wisdom. If the mountain of debris at the Tool show last night is any evidence, the “leave no trace” idea still seeks time to really sink in.

The other pearl of guidance that some mellower folks have no problem abiding is the amazingly obvious: pace yourself. Frankly, I have a big problem with this at Bonnaroo, and yesterday, I paid for it.

Having tripped onto a giant metal tent-stake and incurring an injury that makes last year’s bonnarash pale in comparative misery, this reporting reveler refused to stop enjoying himself, and instead, pushed back into the party like a warring masochist making his last stand.

Times I cried: listening to Michael Franti lecture on the Solar Stage about doing a gig at San Quentin; listening to the Cold War Kids, Richard Thompson, and later Tool. I did not cry during my accident or at the medical tent where I got excellent and friendly attention.

Shows I saw most or part of: Drops of Water, Cold War Kids, Richard Thompson, Tortoise, Michael Franti and Spearhead, The Nightwatchman, Tool, The String Cheese Incident, STS9, and EL-P.

Shows I listened to but did not see: Kings of Leon (I was trying to get there when I fell); Manu Chao (my needed rest and nursing hour.

Some high points: The crowd support at the shows—people loving musicians and musicians loving their people; a new Cold War Kids song about “dreams that old men dream” and taking us from “the gutter to the mountaintop”; Richard Thompson’s “Dad is Going To Kill Me” about the Iraq War; Tom Morello leading thousands in a rousing version of “This Land Is Your Land” and later joining Tool onstage to play guitar during “Lateralus”; the STS9 dance party, which even for the walking wounded is as uplifting and ecstatic as we expect these shows to be.

Let’s see if I can manage to make it through today without too much trauma and transform my lesson into a listening feast and time for friendship.

Hot and Dusty By Day, Delicious Dancing At Night

Our Bonnaroo so far has ranged from hot and dusty by day to delicious dancing at night. All of the Academy volunteers are doing such a great job, so I have been able to connect with the music, and to these fine souls, I am forever grateful.

The first day of Academy tent workshops seemed surprisingly slow, but this morning, after around 500 people took a yoga class, we had our best crowds yet for theater and painting classes.

Walking around this wild place, I have this to testify: Love to the Clean Vibes people, who provide phenomenal waste recovery infrastructure of a miraculous scale. Litterbugs decorate the grass with plastic at night, and in the morning, Clean Vibes folks sweep the field. They say separation is easier when they do it. Apparently, some inebriated folks don’t understand how to use a recycling bin

A short update of shows so far:

My first show of the festival was an abbreviated version of the Sideshow Bennie experience with Miss Lollypop’s burlesque on the Solar Stage. A fellow traveler from the activist community questioned the relevance to Planet Roo of some of their shtick—like a game of “strip darts”: where the lovely lass threw darts at Bennie’s back, and when she missed, she discarded clothes.

At night, the Black Angels turned up the feedback and fuzzed the freaks with a loud nd lusty contact buzz. Still at “This Tent,” Mute Math provided a passionate sonic surprise, and we found our dancefloor down front.

Leaving Mute Math early for the National, we were disappointed that the show had not begun. What band shows up 30 minutes late for a 60 minute Bonnaroo set? I still stayed for some, and as much as I love this group, it didn’t quite gel as well as it could have.

From Mute Math, I traveled to the tightly packed Troo Lounge for a sweaty, skanking, high-ranking reggae jam with my new best friends called Dubconscious.

During the day, this lounge has tables, and since no one bothered to clear the floor, some of us ended up topless on table tops, shaking our asses and waving our fists. This worked until we worked the table into the ground, in crashing cacophony. Not phased, the people crowd-surfed the table and many chairs out to the perimeter without losing a beat. Amazing. Later, some of us did our best reggae mosh into the final minutes.

Easily, my favorite show far, with Mute Math ranking a close second. The Dubconscious folks allowed me to announce their Academy panel from the stage.

Eli, one of my Academy colleagues and dancing buddies, raced me across the fields to catch some Tea Leaf Green at “The Other Tent.” I danced until ravenous and tired and ready to stroll back to camp for a late-snack and needed sleep.

This morning, I already had my morning music fix with the first few songs of Drops of Water on the Solar Stage, including my favorite, “Forever Wild.” That's the amazing Ashley Ironwood singing above!

Back to work and play until its time to try to post again tomorrow morning!!

Some people don’t like hippies

According to one webzine’s coverage of Bonnaroo last year (the site is rivalfish.com, from which we borrowed the picture of winged dancers--all the other pictures here are from today!), the festival is “America's biggest, most impressive, most eclectic gathering of hippies, hipsters, former frat boys, former sorority girls, former Deadheads, backpack clad drug dealers, and as of 2006, some of our nation's most notable corporations.”

But just saying the word “hippy” causes all kinds of knee-jerk reactions. In fact, an entire sub-genre of Bonnaroo Inc.’s media and public relations should be devoted to dealing with the hippy question. Why has a word once associated with enlightened, laid-back, and loving attitudes suddenly become such a catch-all curse, an-all-purpose pejorative pruned for permanent patchouli-bashing?

Also in 2006, an entire blog (thesequitur.com) focused on the “Daily Dirty Hippie Update,” complete with such brilliantly analytical statements such as: “not only are hippies dirty, but they are stupid too.” Then, when the Nashville Rage published a Bonnaroo preview last week, the whole project seemed fueled by a passionate desire to bust the Bonnaroo myth-makers. So, in a talking-points fashion, they went-a-debunking:

MYTH: Bonnaroo is only for people who wear their hair in dreadlocks, don't bathe, take in strays off the side of the road, make their clothes out of hemp and travel crosscountry in Volkswagen bus caravans.

MYTHBUSTER: Bonnaroo is for anyone anywhere who likes music. It regularly attracts more than 80,000 music fans from across the world of every color, age and ethnicity.

Now, while I genuinely appreciate the Rage for all they do to keep the other Nashville weekly (known Hippie-phobes who have reported a deep allergy to natural human body odor and drum circles) from owning the audience, the “mythbusting” mission did not deal with the core issue. Why do people love to hate hippies? What’s the big deal? Amazingly, the hippies are feeling the heat and may even suggest that they are marginalized and oppressed in their own jamtastic utopia.

A young Deadhead asked on one of the Bonnaroo message boards whether the festival was still “Dead-friendly,” bemoaning, among other things, the non-headline status of Bob Weir and Ratdog. As a post-Dead closet-Deadhead friend-of-Jerry for whom indy-rock is a much more relevant passion, I wish the jammie scene would take off the blinders and realize how something like Bonnaroo encompasses everything it needs and so much more it wants to discover.

Last year when the Dresden Dolls played an impeccable cover of “White Rabbit,” we “got it” without needing to download a primer on smashing stereotypes and breathing the eclectic that the Bonnaroo programmers brag about.

Don’t we know it’s about time that the notions of “jam” and “psychedelic” and other such labeling limits need to crack the code of convergence that popular music has achieved in the space odyssey that is the twenty-first century? If Jeff Tweedy and Wilco or Jim James and My Morning Jacket or Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips have anything to do with it, we should be able to lay these desperately dumb dichotomies into the Clean Vibes refuse pile once and for all.

I have my own hippy issues. We know it’s a predictable and cheesy song to lay into the mix, but the only theme song for the pre-Roo week that’s not from a current record by a band on the 2007 bill was the classic “Tennessee Jed” by the Grateful Dead—from the Live Europe 72 record.

Having my inner punk and indy-rock-snob beat the living crap out of my inner hippy for the last twenty-odd years has not stopped me becoming again the love-child that I am: arm-waving, patchouli-soaked, convulsively-grooving-as-barefoot-and-shiny-happy as some might predict to see at Bonnaroo.

It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love!! In honor of all the acid that your parents and grandparents ate that year, can we finally and fundamentally lay this debate to rest?

Instead of arguing about who hates hippies the most (even as these same anti-hippy dogmatics enjoy all kinds of hippy pastimes—not just the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll), let’s find a new Bonnaroo hobby. One I discovered today is inventing a new deity, based on one of my camping companions outfits. Our new God is Jallah, a hybrid patriarch who is equal parts Jah, Allah, and Jello Biafra.

Out with the old god and in with the new god. Now who has my goddamn stash?